Tufts Poetry Award Winners Reflect on Poetry, Identity, and the American Landscape

Poetry has always played a vital role in defining and challenging the zeitgeist. In today’s cultural and political moment — where constructive dialogue can feel fractured and elusive — poetry stands as both a witness and a bridge to deeper conversations about history, heritage, and tradition.

Jaswinder Bolina’s English as a Second Language, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Ariana Benson’s Black Pastoral, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, offer their audiences fresh insights and perhaps a moment of respite as they navigate questions of identity and belonging. 
 
“Poetry gives language to the otherwise inexpressible,” says Lori Anne Ferrell, Dean of the CGU School of Arts and Humanities and Director of the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards Program, “whether joyous, grievous, or contemplative.  We desperately need the singular vocabulary — the exacting consolation — offered to us by this year’s winning poets.” 

Chosen annually, the Kingsley Tufts award — one of the largest annual awards in contemporary poetry — provides $100,000 for a book by a mid-career poet.

Bolina, an accomplished author who teaches in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Miami, received the news of his selection via a phone call from the judges during the annual “Call the Winner’s Dinner”— a Tufts tradition.

“I was stunned when I learned I was a finalist, and I was humbled when I learned who the other finalists were. Being in company with those books and writers felt like prize enough, so much so that I truly would have felt perfectly elated even if I hadn’t won. But getting that phone call was like a kick in the chest without any of the hurt, or like the ceiling was falling on my head but in a good way.”

Bolina has written five previous poetry collections: Of Color: essays (2020), The 44th of July (2019), Phantom Camera (2013), and Carrier Wave (2007), as well as the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (2014). When discussing his intentions for English as a Second Language, Bolina kept it candid.

“You don’t write a poem with the idea that you’ll win this kind of prize, not when you’re sitting there deciding between a comma or a period, between this word and that one,” Bolina says. “You’re so fixated on the writing that anything like this feels like an absolute thunderclap. I can’t thank the judges and administrators enough for the chance to share it with my parents. They raised an odd kid in a foreign country among strange and different people. Still, they supported me no matter how often or how much my career decisions probably terrified them.”

Deft in its construction, English as a Second Language starts and ends with a table of contents — a brilliant concept that allows the book to be read forward or backward without losing any thread of nuance. Bolina invites readers to reconsider the fluidity of language, the strangeness of what we deem normal, and the ways in which culture shapes our understanding of both. 

“I want to challenge the reader’s idea of what we think of as normal is, in fact, very weird. That what we think of as strange is, in fact, very human. That language is either a barrier or a tool. Or it’s both, and we get to choose how to use it.” Bolina says. “I was born and raised in the U.S. I’ve understood and spoken English since before I can remember. But I can say the same about Punjabi. I’m a mediocre speaker, and I’m entirely illiterate in it, so I say it’s my second language, but when you learn two languages at the same time, which one is first and which one is second and why and how?”

Ariana Benson’s Black Pastoral

The Kate Tufts Discovery Award, which carries a $10,000 prize and recognizes a first book by a poet of significant promise, was awarded to Ariana Benson’s poetry collection Black Pastoral, which explores the duality of Black people’s past and present relationship with nature in America.

Black Pastoral was born out of the 2020 pandemic, which brought Benson from London back to her hometown in rural southern Virginia. While there, she was able to reconnect with nature and reflect on experiences that helped shape the foundation of the collection.

“I started playing around in the field of nature poetry in 2020, when I had to suddenly return home to southern Virginia during the beginning of the pandemic,” Benson says. “Only six months before I had moved to London for graduate school, and I had been in Atlanta the years prior to that — both environments much more urban that the one I had grown up in. So, when I came back to our house in the woods, thrust back to the swamp and the beaches of the coast, all my childhood love of nature came flooding back. ... So as much as the book’s coming together was shaped by an unprecedented pause in the timeline of my life, as well as the world at large, I can also say that these poems had been brewing inside me for years.”

Benson hopes Black Pastoral will challenge audiences’ understanding of the past, particularly in relation to Black Americans.

“I hope they are left thinking about the way that ‘history’ of Black Americans wasn’t that long ago at all. ... Today especially, there is a push to put these events behind us, to box them up as if they’re petrified artifacts of a distant past that have no bearing on our lives today. But those who are descendants of these events, these peoples, know nothing could be further from the truth.”

Bolina and Benson will be honored on April 23, onstage at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Taper Auditorium. This will be followed by a reading and a Q&A with both poets. The event will be open to the public.